Reading List: Leslie Jamison, Author of “The Empathy Exams”

This week, Emily devotes her reading list to Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 27, 2014

Walking Scar(r)ed

A new mother receives a difficult diagnosis:

As a journalist, I frequently dig into the darker corners of life in an effort to extract not just facts, but also truths. At work, I’m meticulously—and among my colleagues, comically and notoriously—organized with spreadsheets, binders of notes, and boxes of documents. I tend to leave this orderliness at the office, so when it came time to have my first child, I never made a birth plan. I didn’t read books. I hadn’t even researched what could go wrong during labor. I figured women had been doing this for millennia, I had a good medical team, and my son and I shared a mutual interest in our mutual survival.

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: May 1, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,816 words)

Who Will Watch the Watchers?

When U.S. border patrol agents have shot and killed Mexican citizens along the border, there have been very few consequences:

A Corpus Christi trial lawyer named Bob Hilliard represents the families of both Sergio Hernández and Guillermo Arévalo. “Hernández was not throwing rocks. And I don’t think Arévalo was either,” he said. “But what if they were? Would a Laredo police officer shoot somebody dead for throwing a rock at him from a hundred feet away?”

Hilliard’s wrongful-death suit on behalf of Hernández was dismissed by an El Paso judge in August 2011 on the grounds that the victim was not killed in the United States and therefore not entitled to relief under the U.S. Constitution. “If I understand that correctly, it means any agent can do anything he wants to anybody as long as the victim is in Mexico and the agent is on U.S. soil,” Hilliard said. “Does that sound right to you?” Hilliard has appealed the ruling. His suit on behalf of Arévalo has yet to be filed.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Apr 24, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,171 words)

Trapped Underwater: How A Group Of Strangers Saved A Boy’s Life

When a car plummets into a remote lake in British Columbia with a five-year-old boy trapped inside, a group of strangers must spring into action to save him:

John resurfaced for air. By now Mark had manoeuvred the boat and was tossing life jackets to a few bystanders floundering in the lake. John went under again and discovered the car doors were jammed shut. He then decided to try the back hatch. He had been underwater for scarcely a minute but already felt depleted—another reminder that a lifetime of smoking was catching up to him. Camping gear floated out of the trunk as John released the hatch and struggled to remove non-buoyant items. Then, with his eyes burning from the cold water, he glimpsed an image he’ll never forget: Rowan’s blond hair, waving in the water, his limp arms suspended overhead.

Published: May 1, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,164 words)

This Man Is About to Die Because an Alcoholic Lawyer Botched His Case

What does it take for a condemned person to win a resentencing?

When people recount their alcohol consumption after a night on the town, or even a serious bender, they usually think about it in terms of drinks. Very rarely do they calibrate their intake in quarts. So most of us don’t have a good sense of just how much a quart of vodka is—a bit more than 21 shots, as it turns out. That’s the amount of alcohol lawyer Andy Prince consumed every night during the death penalty trial of his client, Robert Wayne Holsey, a low-functioning man with a tortured past who now stands on the brink of execution in Georgia.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Apr 22, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,199 words)

George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview

An interview with ‘Game of Thrones’ author George R.R. Martin:

You’ve talked before about the original glimpse of the story you had for what became A Song of Ice and Fire: a spontaneous vision in your mind of a boy witnessing a beheading, then finding direwolves in the snow. That’s an interesting genesis.

It was the summer of 1991. I was still involved in Hollywood. My agent was trying to get me meetings to pitch my ideas, but I didn’t have anything to do in May and June. It had been years since I wrote a novel. I had an idea for a science-fiction novel called Avalon. I started work on it and it was going pretty good, when suddenly it just came to me, this scene, from what would ultimately be the first chapter of A Game of Thrones. It’s from Bran’s viewpoint; they see a man beheaded and they find some direwolf pups in the snow. It just came to me so strongly and vividly that I knew I had to write it. I sat down to write, and in, like, three days it just came right out of me, almost in the form you’ve read.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Apr 23, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,332 words)

Driving Jane

Steve Jobs’s once-estranged daughter on Mona Simpson’s fictionalized portrayal of their family:

We drove. I sat on my mother’s lap in the driver’s seat and steered while she did the pedals, keeping us at 15 mph. She held her hands an inch away from the steering wheel, hovering, in case I overestimated one of the turns on our twisted road in Los Trencos, California. It was just the two of us, my mom and me – so nobody told her she was crazy. My mother knew: at five I was coordinated enough to steer the car.

In my aunt Mona Simpson’s book, A Regular Guy, a girl named Jane also drives. Her impoverished mother, Mary di Natali, sends her to find Jane’s rich father, Tom Owens.

Published: Apr 1, 1999
Length: 19 minutes (4,995 words)

‘Your Feeling of Autonomy Is a Fantasy’

A remarkable inside look at the hope, desperation, and financial realities for startups and founders working in San Francisco and Silicon Valley:

All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.

Source: Wired
Published: Apr 23, 2014
Length: 42 minutes (10,559 words)

What Michael Did

A family copes after a schizophrenic son kills his mother:

“He did what he did out of fear,” Michael’s father says now. “He was mentally ill. Not criminally responsible means you’re not morally responsible.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” says Rebecca, who rested her hand on her brother’s shoulder as they walked out of court that day.

Her twin did not feel the same way. For years after his mother’s death, John was furious with Michael. He can admit it now because his perspective has changed. But at the time, though he didn’t broadcast it to the rest of his family, John was enraged.

Source: Toronto Star
Published: Apr 22, 2014
Length: 31 minutes (7,856 words)

Why Does Anne Boleyn Obsess Us?

From Hilary Mantel’s bestselling novels to a Showtime series, Anne Boleyn haunts us still. But why?

Putting to rest the rumors of the third nipple (probably just a mole) and the sixth finger (a vestigial fingernail, but that’s what comes of generations of marrying cousins), Bordo’s larger goal is to ask: Why does Anne get to people the way she does? How could this woman have captured the heart of a king to such an extent that he would tear his kingdom apart to have her, alienating the pope and half the leaders in Europe, casting aside his wife and daughter, waiting six long years to marry a nonroyal who wouldn’t bring him any money, prestige, or diplomatic agreements? And what happened to their marriage? How could Henry have actually murdered her?

Source: Daily Beast
Published: Apr 25, 2013
Length: 6 minutes (1,745 words)